Green Flames

About ten years ago, I saw my first aurora; I still remember that second night in Iceland, sitting by the Harpa Center, when we saw it timidly appear in a sky that didn’t give us a break because of the light pollution from the country’s largest city. I recall that, while we were heading back to the hotel, I said I was completely satisfied with what I’d seen. Neither of us imagined what we’d set in motion, since it’s now almost an annual ritual to chase auroras. In fact, we planned all of 2024 around maximizing our chances of seeing them, including a camper‐van trip through Norway that covered more than 12,000 km—and where we witnessed, to date, the most powerful aurora we’ve ever seen.

In 2024 we saw auroras in six different European countries: Spain, France, Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden.
This photo, however, was taken at the end of 2023, with some friends on another spur-of-the-moment trip with no set route or hotels, where our GPS coordinates were guided by clear skies and our patience was tested as we waited for the lights to dance.